


The Keep

by tooth_and_claw



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 09:17:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1893633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tooth_and_claw/pseuds/tooth_and_claw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tavish returns to the place he learned what it meant to be a DeGroot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Keep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Measured](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured/gifts).



 

“Holy shit, you *live* here? Oh, man, you guys better get up here and see this. Wow, I feel like a real Yank in the court, right?” Scout dropped his duffle in the grass and pounded Demo on his shoulder.

            “Aye, but tisn’t a King Arthur that lives here, lad. Only Lord DeGroot and his merry men!” Demo raised his arms to the sky and crowed out the last part, ignoring the grumbles and protests from those emerging from the vehicles at hill foot. Before him, the sky was showing blue through great slashes in the clouds, Jacob’s ladders bringing all the lord’s men home, and a fierce wind lifted the smells of the countryside to him. “Home again, home again, jiggety-bloody-jig!” He laughed, and tossed his Scrumpy bottle into the air before catching it and whisking it to his belt.

            Home, hah. Alright, so that wasn’t exactly true—home in the ancestral sense, for sure, but he hadn’t even remembered about the broken down pile of rocks until RED contacted them and said here was where BLU was planning their next front in the war. Apparently DeGroot keep sat atop the finest gravel in all of Scotsdom. Who knew, eh?

            Everything was so green. As the rest of the team staggered up the slope, Demo ran down the opposite side, whooping and hollering, until he tripped, and then whooping and rolling. There were protests from his teammates, growing fainter by the second. Demo couldn’t give two shits. They’d find their way in without him; wasn’t like there was a dearth of entrances. RED had fixed the place up since he last saw it (why fix it up just to tear it down? For the bloody joy of it, of course). It had a drawbridge that wasn’t rotten through. And a moat, which was empty. Demo discovered this when he broke through the rushes and crashed into it, nearly breaking his legs in the 10 foot fall and definitely breaking his Scrumpy bottle. “Ach, no!” He moaned, picking the glass out of his arse.

            His hand found something in the mud, something long and hard and get your mind out of the gutter, lad, this was—a plastic sword. Cracked and filthy, expected being that it was at the bottom of a drained moat, but there were still some flecks of paint on it, and a few other markings beside. A black scrawl across the pommel.

            Demo went numb, and not from alcohol poisoning. He gingerly lifted the sword, barely long as his forearm, so he could get a better look at the scribble: Tavish.

            “It’s me broadsword,” he whispered. “I lost ye, didn’t I? Cavortin' around, bein' a nuisance, and whoopsie-daisy, into the drink you went. But when was that, eh?” He tried a few practice swings and cringed as the plastic clacked against itself, coming apart at the seams.

            That was a question, wasn’t it? When it was he was last here. Memories from his youth were not hazy things per se, but sometimes, Demo had to admit—though only when he was having a good manly weep—they tended to get a little mixed up with his mythologies. This, though . . . it couldn’t cut through anything else, but it cut through the fog, just a little bit. Just enough.

            His parents had just claimed him. They were trying to impress upon him all those things that made him a DeGroot, and he was, he was *elated*. He was flying high on the joy that came from living the orphan’s dream, the archetypical wish whispered in convents and orphanages across all continents: let my family find me. They had, they had, and it was more glorious than he could have imaged. He was a *lord*. He had a *castle*. Well, his family did, and it was naught but rubble surrounded by boggy water, but there could not have been a grander keep in all the land as far as he was concerned.

            “Pay attention!” shouted his newly found mother, and whacked him good with her walking stick.

            “Ow! What was that for?” He rubbed his sore arm and glared at her; not that she could see. Blindness, the greatest mark of distinction among the clan. His mother was a very distinguished woman. She was a *lady*.

            “For fucking up my speech. For  _sass_ ,” this was a gravest offense. Tavish kicked at the rotting boards of the bridge, thinking about little Billy Borden, and how his  _sass_ had him returned to the orphanage *five times*. “Now pay attention, boyo. This is DeGroot keep, ancestral home of the DeGroot clan all the way back to when the first Moor set his feet upon Scotland and said ‘Good god, is this the best they’ve got? All right, then.’”

            His new father was somewhere inside. He knew this because mother DeGroot was interrupted by a boom and one of the few towers still standing transitioning into a state of not-so-standing. “Is Da dead?” Tavish asked, mildly concerned but also consternated. That tower had been marked to be his clubhouse.

            “Not if he values his life,” his mum said delicately. “Now, Tavish. This is sacred land you’re standing on. We’ve shown you our greatest holdings, told you all our tales, helped you make your first landmine. You’re ready to see our finest treasure.” From out of nowhere she was holding a burlap sack. Tavish’s eyes grew wide as she dropped her stick to pull, with a flourish, a glittering object out of the bag.

            “A colander!” Tavish awed. His mum did a double take—this was entertaining, as she had no idea where she was double-taking to—and tossed the kitchen implement into the weeds.

            “Blast it. No . . . ahah!” She reached in again, and, after rooting around, pulled out another glittering object. Tavish didn’t have words. “This is the symbol of your legacy and lineage, boy.”

            The crown was nothing like the tinny, foil-and-paste toys he’d seen other kids sporting. It glinted with fiery brilliance, the gold polished to a molten sheen; gems in cabochon, emerald and oval cuts sparkled over its surface, and it had a weight to it. Gravitas. Plus real weight, because his mum’s skinny arm started shaking. Tavish reached out for it, but her other hand whipped out fast as an asp and smacked him across the face. From its precarious place on his belt, his broadsword, the finest blade a lord could have until he hit it against a rock and it split, flew free of its shoelace bindings and tumbled into the moat, where it not so much sank as was swallowed. Tavish staggered.

            “Not yet, laddie.” His mother whispered. “Ye have to earn it, first. When you’re ready, you come and claim it.”

            Mother DeGroot wound up her arm, and in an impressive feat of strength, daring, and horrifyingly little regard for the protection and care of antique ancestral crowns, chucked the thing over the castle walls and into the labyrinth of collapsed stone, misplaced gunpowder, and stickybombs.

            Where it lay, to this day. Or, er, would lay, if RED hadn’t cleaned the place up. But somewhere in there, Tavish knew, lay his destiny, his birthright. Tonight he claimed what was his.

            If he could just get out of this moat first.


End file.
